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Downstate
Poems by DAVID GARDINER

| Paperback | 127 x 203 mm | 68 pages | ISBN 978-0-9561287-3-7 | February 2009

The poems in Downstate recount journeys from David Gardiner’s native Chicago & Polish neighborhoods of his childhood, to the Southern territories of his distant American past, to the contemporary Ireland where he has lived over the past twenty years. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: “The truth is, that, every half century, at longest, a family should be merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its ancestors. Human blood, in order to keep its freshness, should run in hidden streams, as the water of an aqueduct is conveyed in subterranean pipes.” Gardiner’s work does not forget his ancestors, who extend back proudly through past the Civil War in America on one side, and to twentieth-century Poland on the other. These poems explore a rich subterranean heritage uniting the cities and landscapes in which he has lived and worked stretching from Dublin to Chicago to New York uniting pasts & presents as families break and build again. 

Writer, publisher, and professor, David Gardiner lives in New York City. He splits his time between the U.S. where he teaches Irish Studies and his duties at Trinity College Dublin. Since 1989, when he attended University College-Galway, he has commuted between Ireland and the U.S. A published poet and critic, in 2004, he became founding editor of the international journal, An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, Culture, and the Arts (Creighton University Press) and in 2005 he took over directorial duties of Creighton University Press. His doctorate was earned at Loyola University, under the direction of the late Prof. Seán Lucy. Before that, he studied at the University of Chicago, the University of St. Thomas, & Penn State University. He has published numerous books, articles, and poems. Gardiner is currently a visiting scholar at Boston College, New York University, and the University of Ulster.
Sample Poem

Entomology: Natural History Museum, Dublin

for Steffani

Italian, Polish & silly laughter at tit birds
fill the dead zoo. I head straight by
kits perpetually at play back to the hawk moths.

Pink & green & ridiculous, they’re mounted under glass.
I think of them hovering around foxgloves,
scolding me for drinking their nectar out of fuchsia.

Looking for that iridescent green moth again,
I realize I know nothing about them. Noctuidae,
hemiptera, and even callophrys rubi seem all the same to me…

Then I hear a couple call a mountain ringlet ‘boring.’
I want to turn on them & tell them, “the last one,
the last one, was taken at Lough Gill in 1895,

that whatever their gropey, bored hands think,
this single blue-brown moth hasn’t been seen in a century.”
But they’re gone too. I’m left with the true bugs.

Smashed capsids & a hilariously mounted leafhopper
now have me pinned here in the back of the museum.
There’s nothing boring again.

By the time the kids have bought their plastic animals,
I’m leaning on the case, laughing at myself in love
with the cock-chafer’s eye-lashes, rose-chafer’s shell—

the delicate beauty of the tortoise beetle;
all the delineations & small wildness of a world
we hold forever in our hands.
Reviews/Articles

Downstate reviewed by Richard Tillinghast, The Irish Times, Saturday May 16th 2009

Some parts of the United States are familiar to Irish people. Boston is well-known as an Irish city, and at Christmas the NYPD Choir can be relied upon to be singing Galway Bay. But the Midwest, despite being explored by at least a few Irish poets including Eamonn Wall, the late James Liddy and the Irish-American Thomas Lynch, remains terra incognita for many, even in the US. This is the territory David Gardiner claims as his own. In Bungalow Belt he writes, “I was born, raised in Brute, Oblivion . . . . I come from a neighbourhood where ‘regular’ / Was the supreme compliment . . .”.

While properly cognisant of the Midwest’s relentless insistence on conformity and homogenisation, “the vacuum that all our pasts are becoming”, Gardiner is particularly attuned to the vividness brought to this levelling culture by what is known curiously in America as “ethnic”, ie not the familiar identifications such as Wasp, Irish, African-American, but Italian, Polish and less familiar Eastern European nationalities.

He is a connoisseur of “Polish facades and Spanish billboards”; in Imaginary Mazurkas he reports, “At night, I look for the big-kettled kitchens”. He likes the bartender in the club car on the commuter train who “learned to speak English twenty-seven years ago / From Old Mr. Boston’s De Luxe Bartending Guide ”.

Second Street Pesach evocatively blends memories of Catholic and Jewish ancestry; of his great-grandmother, he writes: “Her silence knew the Kishinev pogrom. / Her husband was still; a picture in the bedroom mirror – / in a prayer shawl, standing in important pose, / obscured by the lacey dress of the Child of Prague”.

 

Downstate reviewed by James McAuley, The Irish Examiner, Monday June 22, 2009

One might pick up from the title that David Gardiner is American; having attended UCG, he has pursued a distinguished academic career in the US, and commutes between Ireland and America.

His métier is the short lyric, whether Asleep in the City – addressed to a child, envying your peach comforter, your pacifier, all those oxymoronic things..." or Coming Back, one of several poems which revisit places where I wanted them to be older, the crossing guard to have gone gray, and the pavement to have buckled mercilessly...."

The tone is intimate and casual, impelled by rapid shifts from image to image, a kind of reportage sustained by subtle ironic undertones. From the first of this book’s three sections one gets the feeling that under the rather fragmental narration and caustic tone there’s a lecture (or sermon?) about hard times in America.

Certainly, these snapshots of life in the urban US make for cheerless reading, the wording strained, even hurried, by preconceived brevity or didactic impulses.

However, he redeems his poems from sailing too close to triviality by combining mild irony with rueful humour, so that ordinary household scenes, the weather’s shifty doings, the lives and times of various persons and personages – all receive the same distanced, mildly ironic, treatments.

This review appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Monday, June 22, 2009

 

Salmon Poetry, Knockeven, Cliffs of Moher, County Clare, Ireland
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About this Book
Sample Poem